Russell Returned Truck `Smelly'' And With Red Stains, Friend Testifies

Smith McLain was angry when his longtime drinking buddy finally returned his pickup truck, and not only because it had been kept out all night without permission.

The truck, which McLain kept meticulously clean, was in disgusting condition when George Waterfield Russell dropped it off the morning of June 23.

It smelled of vomit, McLain told a King County jury in Russell's triple-murder trial yesterday - and of a smell like the insides of animals "when they're cut open."

There were red stains, with a particularly large one on the driver's seat, he said, and a whitish substance all over the interior. McLain testified he pulled out the floor carpets, put a towel down on the driver's seat and drove to an auto detailer - who took one look, one sniff, and asked, "Did all hell break loose in there?"

King County prosecutors say it did.

They say Russell had murdered Mary Anne Pohlreich, 27, in the truck that night in an attack that left her skull fractured and her liver torn.

And then, they say, weeks after Pohlreich's nude and battered body was found the next day posed next to a trash bin outside a Bellevue restaurant, Russell murdered again, and again.

His other victims, they say, were also Eastside women and were also posed after death: Carol Marie Beethe, 35, found in her Bellevue home Aug. 9, 1990, and Andrea Levine, 24, found in her Kingsgate apartment, also in bed, on Sept. 3.

Russell, a 33-year-old Mercer Island dentist's son and high-school dropout, is charged with aggravated murder in the Beethe and Levine killings, and first-degree murder in the Pohlreich case.

Described in the past by acquaintances as bright and charming, he is the first person to be tried as a serial killer in King County.

He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

McLain, who had been a drinking buddy of Russell's for seven years, testified on the fourth day of the trial yesterday that Russell had asked for the keys to McLain's truck that evening.

Russell said he needed to get a shirt with a collar to be allowed on the dance floor at Papagayo's in Bellevue, where a group of friends had been having dinner.

But Russell never returned that night, McLain said.

When he brought the pickup back the next day, he told his friend he'd finally gotten to spend some time with a blond female Papagayo's customer he had long admired and spoken of.

Russell said he'd taken the truck because he didn't want to be seen in the passenger seat of the woman's white Porsche 911.

He was sorry about the smell, McLain recalled Russell saying, but he'd had too much to drink and had thrown up.

The pickup's red stains, prosecutors say, months later yielded DNA evidence against Russell.

According to prosecutors, blood traces in the truck matched that of Pohlreich and about 6 percent of the population.

Semen found in Pohlreich identifies Russell, they say.

As public defender Miriam Schwartz cross-examined McLain, she pointed out where, in court and in previous statements to police, McLain had stated varying times and dates for the events, raising the question of whether McLain knew for sure it was June 22 when Russell borrowed the truck.

Schwartz asked McLain whether he'd always wanted to be a police officer, suggesting to the jury that his testimony was tainted by his desire to please police, with whom he'd become friendly after he was contacted.

Bellevue police did return McLain's 1989 Toyota truck to him with an almost completely new interior, at a cost to the city of about $2,000, said Detective Marv Skeen.